TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

Abstract

This translation is an effort and product of the University of Texas at Austin Department of Linguistics, to which we belong as faculty and doctoral students, and of our Center for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (CILLA). CILLA, a part of the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at UT, was established in 2001 when one of us, Nora England, joined the Linguistics faculty with a mission to promote teaching and research focused on the documentation, description, conservation, and support of Latin American Indigenous languages. Nora’s guiding idea was that the centerpiece of any such enterprise should be the doctoral training of native and heritage speakers of Indigenous languages of Latin America in linguistics and allied fields like anthropology; from that, she maintained, the rest would follow (described in Woodbury and England 2004). In the years since then, nine Indigenous students from Latin America have earned their degrees here, with one more shortly on the way, writing doctoral dissertations on a range of mostly documentary and descriptive topics on their own or other languages and working alongside other graduate students and faculty from a variety of other backgrounds. We believe that respecting, promoting, and integrating Indigenous students’ perspectives and goals has led to new thinking about disciplinary agendas and also reflects and supports our commitment to acknowledging and rectifying discrimination in academia at all stages. This volume, it seems to us, is an outstanding example of such new thinking.